Saturday, February 16, 2013

Review - The Uninvited

This book took me a little longer to get into the flow of, but once I was there, I could not put it down.

This book starts with a shocking opening account, for no known reason a seven-year-old murders her grandmother. From that moment on, other bizarre cases of children killing their parents spreads throughout the world.

Hesketh Lock, an anthropologist, has been called in by his company, Phipps and Wexman, to analyze this behavior. He has just finished up on a study in Taiwan and now he is flying around the world, following up on one bizarre case after another. Now adults are committing suicide but before their deaths, they tell of strange children, children that have entered their bodies and are forcing them to do awful things.

Having Asperger’s Syndrome, Hesketh has never been very good at relationships, but he does have a gift for eliminating emotions and associating behavioral patterns. His beloved Professor Whybray has nurtured this gift in him. Other than Professor Whybray, they only shining light in his life is Freddy, the son of his girlfriend, a wonderfully curious little boy. Hesketh is not an easy character to relate to, he does take some getting used to - he has a fascination with origami and paint charts, he is a master of Venn diagrams and his social interactions with females is inappropriate to put it mildly.

As the cases multiply exponentially, the truly heart wrenching happens close to home and Hesketh must find a way to protect the vulnerable without any more harm coming to those that he loves.

From the beginning, this book reminded me of a movie that I saw decades ago “Village of the Damned”, where a collective consciousness seemed to take over the minds of children. That movie has creeped me out to this day and this book has reinforced the creepy factor.

What has inhabited these children and adults seems so farfetched, but at the same time, your logical mind wanders to the “well, what if’s” and you are left with …to be honest, I have no idea what you are left with other than a shutter and your mind spinning.